Project 3: Little Star

1.Project Introduction

In this project, we will learn the PWM control of ARDUINO.

PWM is the abbreviation of Pulse Width Modulation, which is

a technology that encodes analog signal level into digital

signal level.

Here, we use PWM to control the brightness of an LED from

bright to dark gradually. Match our customized star card,

you will get a flickering star.

2.Project Hardware

Mega Plus Plus 400-hole USB cable*1

Board*1 Board holder Breadboard

M5 Red 220Ω Jumper Wire*2 Cartoon

LED*1 Resistor*1 Little Star

Card*1

3.PWM Working Principle

PWM stands for Pulse Width Modulation and it is a technique

to control LED’s brightness, speed of DC motor and servo

motor.

The Arduino digital pins either produces 5V (when turned

HIGH) or 0V (when turned LOW). Yet, it output a square

wave signal. So if we want to dim a LED, we cannot get the

voltage between 0 and 5V from the digital pin but we can

change the ON and OFF time of the signal. If we will change

the ON and OFF time fast enough then the brightness of the

led will be changed.

Before going further, let’s discuss some terms associated

with PWM.

TON (On Time): It is the time when the signal is high.

TOFF (Off Time): It is the time when the signal is low.

Period: It is the sum of on time and off time.

Duty Cycle: It is the percentage of time when the signal is

high during the time of period.

So at 50% duty cycle and 1Hz frequency, the led will be

high for half a second and will be low for the other half

second. If we increase the frequency to 50Hz (50 times ON

and OFF per second), then the led will be seen glowing at

half brightness by the human eye.

Arduino and PWM

The Arduino IDE has a built in function “analogWrite()”

which can be used to generate a PWM signal. The frequency

of this generated signal for most pins will be about 490Hz

and we can give the value from 0-255 using this function.
analogWrite(0) means a signal of 0% duty cycle.

analogWrite(127) means a signal of 50% duty cycle.

analogWrite(255) means a signal of 100% duty cycle.

On KEYESTUDIO Mega Plus board, the PWM pins are 3, 5,

6, 9, 10 and 11.

The PWM pins are labeled with ~ sign.

In this project, you are going to learn how to get the PWM

output from the digital pins of Mega Plus board and control

brightness of LED through code.

4.Circuit Connection
How to connect an LED

How to identify 5 band 220Ω Resistor

5.Project Code

/*

keyestudio STEM Starter Kit

Project 3

Little Star

http//www.keyestudio.com

*/

int ledPin = 6;

void setup()

pinMode(ledPin,OUTPUT);

void loop(){

for (int value = 0 ; value < 255; value=value+1){

analogWrite(ledPin, value);
 delay(5);

for (int value = 255; value >0; value=value-1){

analogWrite(ledPin, value);

delay(5);

}}

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1.Open up the Arduino IDE and copy the below code into a

new sketch.

2.Select the correct Board type and COM port for the

Arduino IDE.

3.Click Upload button on Arduino IDE to upload code.

6.Project Result

Done uploading. You will see the LED lights gradually light

up, and then gradually darken.

We put the card of a star on the LED, it looks like a

twinkling star in the sky